


Emily Fontaine Lives Again

by Jakowic



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: (multiple times), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, magician protip: it’s probably not a good idea to do a blood sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:53:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23154358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jakowic/pseuds/Jakowic
Summary: Here are the three curses of Yennefer’s life:one) the memory of growing up what she was, as deformed and dirty as she was. The ugliness of her is permanent, will always set her apart from the other mages, the other women.two) the witcher who saved her life once, and again. And again.three) Aretuza and the green-eyed witch that rules it. Tissaia de Vries and magic are the two things Yennefer could never sweat out of her body.(A retelling of Yennefer’s past)
Relationships: Tissaia de Vries/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 15
Kudos: 39





	Emily Fontaine Lives Again

**Author's Note:**

> a lot of this is semi-canon (as in, i took different aspects of the games, the books and the show as i pleased). and i call them "witches" instead of "mages/sorceresses" because its easier to type. no i don't care don't leave a comment correcting me
> 
> anyways my hindbrain said "lesbians!" so i stopped writing all my other projects to post this.

Yennefer back in Aretuza - who would’ve foreseen? Tissaia, by the look on her face, when she finds Yennefer in the lightning room with the girls. Yennefer of Vengerberg, Tissaia's little piglet. 

Here is Yennefer in Aretuza at seventeen: struggling with the most basic of levitation, Tissaia in her blue gown and high-backed collar looking down her nose at her. Yennefer hates her, hates how this makes her feel, how she _always_ feels, incapable and alone. She hates Aretuza, she hates it, and can feel the storm building up in her, close to bursting.

Tissaia tilts her head at her, and Yennefer crackles with lightning.

✫ ✫ ✫

Yennefer at twenty, Yennefer after Giltine helps her, that's the Yennefer that confronts Tissaia outside the ballroom. Tissaia is _storming,_ which is remarkable. She never does anything but glide, always stalwart and ethereal in her posture. But Yennefer has cracked her down, tumbled Tissaia from her throne, and something in that is more thrilling than any other thing Yennefer can imagine. She rushes out behind Tissaia, desperate for this last crowning moment, the one where _she_ wins.

"He chose me," she calls at Tissaia's back, merciless. "He _chose_ me, and you cannot reject that request, the request of a king!"

Tissaia spins on her, eyes cold, pupils dilated. Yennefer hasn't seen this much concentrated fury in her since the lightning incident. "I was trying to protect you," she hisses. "You're insolent and prideful, and that will be the thing that kills you."

Yennefer swells, the rebellion building inside her. "You can't tell me what to do. You don't _own_ me."

"You don't know a single thing," Tissaia says. "You can live as long as you want, as gorgeous as you want, and you will _never_ know anything."

"I'm just trying to live!" Yennefer shrieks. "I know what I'm doing, what I'm capable of! You and your stinking brotherhood are trying to push me down. You're just afraid." Yennefer sees the expression on Tissaia's face, dismay and resentment. Yennefer advances. "You let these men rule everything that you are, and you're okay with it. You just can't stand that it's your _piglet_ that's the first to rebel."

Tissaia looks like Yennefer just slapped her across the face. "After all I've done for you," she says, voice low and menacing.

Yennefer bares her teeth. "You never did a single goddamn thing for me."

She turns away, back into the ballroom for another dance with her king. Tissaia watches her go.

✫ ✫ ✫

Aedirn is not home. It wasn't home when Yennefer was young, and it isn't home as she serves her years as mage. Aretuza, she thinks, came closest. As terrible, and as ruthless as Tissaia was, as unforgiving as the weather was, Aretuza was the first place where Yennefer was finally something beyond her hunch. 

(She kept her scars -- a reminder for how things could have gone, for how far Yennefer has traveled.

 _A reminder_ , soft, _for Tissaia's voice:_ "You are losing it.")

Tissaia and Stregobor come to Aedirn to assess Yennefer's progress, something she dreads like a newborn dreads a hailstorm on its soft skin. 

Pain, she thinks, not the worst thing in the world anymore. Not for her.

Tissaia spots her first, and so when Yennefer goes up to them in the welcome courtyard, their expressions are already carefully blank. Yennefer keeps her eyes on Tissaia, even as Stregobor talks, because he is a man, and Tissaia knew her first. She takes them to the dining hall and watches as Stregobor chats with the king, throwing his head back and guffawing. She follows Tissaia when she heads for the gardens, finds her standing in front of the pink roses.

"Tissaia," she says, not knowing what to say.

Tissaia looks at her, with sad eyes, and says: "It's a lovely place."

They end up here: Yennefer's room, with the big doors leading to a terraced balcony, with glass windows and the big bed, meant for three or four or more, but right now it's just Yennefer and Tissaia, Tissaia and Yennefer.

It's kind of fucked up, Yennefer thinks: undressing Tissaia, the woman who taught and cared for her throughout her most formative years. But it makes Yennefer's belly catch fire, sharp and sweet and singing with blood. She touches Tissaia's bare hip, the bone underneath her skin, presses her open mouth against Tissaia's collarbone. This, she thinks, is what hunger is, what no mortal can set out to understand - a hunger so bone-marrow deep that her inside feels hollowed out and desperate with it.

So, they sleep together. What of it? It means nothing, and Tissaia and Stregobor are gone the next day.

Yennefer can smell Tissaia on her skin: rose petals, and the rains that soaked Aretuza's coast.

✫ ✫ ✫

Tissaia says please, so Yennefer goes. 

It's that simple, really, no, really it is. Tissaia asked, so Yennefer went. The stronghold is pitiful, she sees, and holds out no hope for a victory. Tissaia may have been the greatest witch Aretuza ever made but Yennefer bested her, once, twice, again and again. Yennefer almost slaughtered a dragon. She almost trapped a djinn inside her, almost killed a Witcher. Tissaia can't beat that.

They prepare the people, a plan, and Yennefer looks at Tissaia's face, the sharp angles, the curve of her mouth. It's been so long, Yennefer struggles to remember what she tastes like. 

Yennefer could never tell whether she wanted Tissaia dead, or naked, or if she just wanted to be Tissaia. All that control, all that self-assured haughtiness. It's foreign to Yennefer, even now. Aretuza's stone walls are far behind her but she's never really left there, not even when she was in Rinde, or Lyria. From the moment she laid eyes on Istredd, part of her belonged to Aretuza.

✫ ✫ ✫

"This, again," she says. "Stupid."

"Don't tell me it's stupid," Geralt responds. 

He's pressed hands against her arms, pulled her against his chest. He smells like sweat and horse. His hair is tangled, and unkept. She wonders where his bard's gone off to that he's so unclean. Strange, she thinks, it's so long ago now, but everyone she loves comes up against Tissaia in her mind. Tissaia is more powerful with magic, she decides eventually. Even Istredd couldn't match her.

"I just want you to stay," he whispers eventually, against the crook of her neck.

When he falls asleep, she waits for an hour before slipping out of bed and away.

All she wants is to fix her mistake, undo her weakness. Yennefer couldn't beat the Ronin Mage and a princess died for it, and here she is, decades later, looking for a cure. The djinn didn't work, maybe another magic would. The sirens, perhaps, or some plant in the Brokilon. Something. 

✫ ✫ ✫

Sodden Hill is the final resting place of Yennefer's dignity. It very well might be the last night they live, and Yennefer can't quite tear her eyes away from Tissaia. She doesn't _stare,_ no. Not the whole time. But she looks, and looks, and Tissaia catches her looking, just once. They make long, careful eye contact across the darkened courtyard, and Yennefer follows her when she excuses herself.

They head up one of the ramparts on the far side of the stronghold where it's deserted. Tissaia rounds a corner ahead of Yennefer and disappears out of sight.

"Tis-" is as far as Yennefer gets when she comes around the side before Tissaia pins her. She considers throwing Tissaia with aard, but then Tissaia kisses her.

"What?" Yennefer asks. "Did you miss me?"

"No, fuck you," Tissaia tells her. "But this might be our last night alive."

So, whatever. Yennefer sleeps with her again. It doesn't mean anything. They're going to die the next day anyway.

✫ ✫ ✫

She dreams of home, sometimes. When she was a child, before her hunch got pronounced and her jaw got too swollen, she could run around with her siblings and all the people in Vengerberg. Those were good times, the youngest of her years she was happy.

That's what's important, isn't it? She was happy when she was young, and when she was seventeen she was bought and taken to Aretuza. On the bad nights, that's what Yennefer thinks of: even though it was cheap, and demeaning, Tissaia _saw_ something in her, something enough to pay for. So, yes, Yennefer can't separate her emotions from her magic, and control is something she can never quite grasp, and all her chaos writhes and fights, but she is worth something enough to pay for.

She is worth something enough to Tissaia.

Yennefer is going to spend the rest of her life fighting to avenge the infant princess, fighting to avenge her own loss, but that thought stays at the back of her mind. Istredd could never understand something like that, the bastardous traitor, that selfish prick. She had never been worth anything to anyone until Tissaia, and then he stole that from her in one word. 

When she leaves, she does it with purpose. She is _never_ going to let herself be taken in by a man.

✫ ✫ ✫

Geralt is here. 

Stupid.

He shouldn't be here, she thinks groggily. There must've been an explosion of the tower, and that's why she's lying down, and why his face is in her view, leaning over her, concerned. The outside world sounds like it's in a thick soup, slow and far away. The other mages, she thinks distantly. Still battling it out with Fringilla. They're dead. Or dying. Yennefer pushes Geralt's face away and struggles to her feet. Slowly the world focuses up again, and Yennefer thinks _shit, fuck, Tissaia,_ and starts moving.

"Yen-" Geralt starts, reaching for her.

The entire top of the tower has been blown off. Above them, the grey-slate sky is lightening as dawn approaches, and below them, the world is on fire. The floor is debris ridden and there are sections of paneling missing from the stairs down to the courtyard. 

"Tissaia!" She screams, looking over the edge of the tower and sees that the Nilfgaardians are advancing on Sodden. "Tissaia!"

"There," Geralt says, pointing down over by the edge of the forest. Tissaia is on her knees, coughing. They take the stairs two at a time, and Yennefer reaches her first, as Tissaia begins to stand.

"Sneaky bitch," Tissaia says, voice hoarse. "But it takes more than poisonous gas to kill me. We'll have to regroup to Mayena, maybe start a blockade on the road."

Yennefer surpises herself. She kisses Tissaia.

"Um," Geralt says.

She tastes like bile and bittermoth, poison mushroom and other disgusting things on the back of her teeth. Her mouth is warm, and silky, and it feels _phenomenal._ Yennefer reaches up, cradles the base of Tissaia's skull as she kisses her harder. Yennefer could never read Tissaia's mind, no matter how hard she tried so she never knew if Tissaia felt anything after the nights they spent together, but they're in the middle of a battleground, Fringilla is commanding an army, there's a Witcher standing behind them, and Tissaia is letting Yennefer kiss her. With tongue. If that's not a sign she doesn't know what is.

"We should..." Geralt clears his throat, "get going."

Yennefer breaks the kiss and looks at Tissaia. Her eyes are cold, but at the corner of her mouth, there's the teeniest, _tiniest_ uptick.

They head back into the barricade, and they're halfway out the back corridor when Sodden's walls break. Chaos erupts as people begin to flee and fight. Nilfgaard begins its slaughter, loud and horrendous and unending. Yennefer and Tissaia begin to run for it, and Yennefer can hear the sound of metal scraping leather as Geralt draws his sword. They hook left, into the bombardment walls, down narrow stone steps into a back room.

"There's an underground passage," Tissaia says. She runs to the back of the room and drops to her knees, pressing bricks at random. "One of these opens it."

Yennefer makes three strides toward Tissaia to help before she hears it. That low, irritating chuckle. _It's a m_ _an,_ she thinks and turns to see Stregobor.

Geralt's scowling at him, sword aloft, ready to take the world on. Yennefer calls up her chaos, feels it crackle and dance between her fingers. 

"What are you doing here?" Yennefer asks.

Stregobor gives her a smile.

✫ ✫ ✫

She leaves Geralt standing on the mountaintop with his stupid bard, and his stupid djinn wish, and his stupid feelings. It's not genuine, that's the betrayal of it all. Nothing that they have, or had, was genuine. It's not a feeling, Yennefer is trapped in a stupid blood bond because of a stupid man. Magic - one of the curses of Yennefer's life.

When Yennefer was at Aretuza, and Istredd was the first man that ever looked at her with desire, there was no _law_ about magic for Yennefer. That was Tissaia's first rule, yes, magic doesn't just leave the body without something sacrificed, but it wasn't a hurdle or an obstacle. Yennefer was limitless, there was no wall for her magic to hit, no such thing as a glass ceiling. 

It was just Yennefer and magic, magic and Yennefer.

The cruelness of Yennefer's sacrifice, her sterilization, was not - as Geralt suspects - related to her womanhood, or a secret desire to become a maternal figure. But it's in this: Yennefer said _Make me a witch_ , expecting Giltine to take her hunch, and her sloping jowl, and her buckled knees, and when she was screaming in pain, delirious and half-way to dead from all the blood leaking out of her, Giltine took something from her. He betrayed Tissaia by helping Yennefer but for some reason, he still insisted on violating her.

All men are the same in that regard. The baron at the manor where she and Geralt first met, the kings that she served, the men that wandered in and out of her apothecary. Even Geralt, who wants her to stay with him even though he refuses to listen to her. It's not _motherhood,_ what a dirty word, tainted from the moment Yennefer's deformities took her happiness, it's herself.

So, okay. Here it is: all the truth in the world - Giltine of Aretuza took something from her. She's going to get it back, law of chaos be dammed. Yennefer of Vengerberg will be the best sorceress to ever walk the earth. Tissaia de Vries will be a footnote in _her_ books.

Funny, even in the depths of her pain, Yennefer thinks of those green eyes. 

✫ ✫ ✫

One moment, Yennefer and Geralt are standing side by side in the Sodden bombardment facing Stregobor's nasty smile, and the next they're sliding through a portal, Tissaia's hand outstretched. The last thing Yennefer sees is Tissaia's green eyes, and a sword slicing her open. Yennefer screams, and keeps screaming. It's a terrible thing inside her, whatever it is. It feels like the night in the lightning room when she lost control, when Tissaia said _Mages like us,_ mages who feel too much. 

They land onto the snowy ground in a forest, near a grain mill. Geralt climbs to his feet while Yennefer stays collapsed on her knees, screaming. She yanks at the power she feels, tries to conjure up a portal back to her, anything back to her, but it won't work. Something must be blocking Sodden from the mages.

Eventually, her throat dries up and Yennefer pants into the snow, feeling... tears? No. Perhaps. Hot and painful, prickling her eyes and sliding down her cheeks in a staccato rhythm. 

Geralt kneels beside her, puts his hand on the center of her back. 

"In the grain house, we'll be safe there, for a bit."

When they get inside, Yennefer registers four things through her vaguely blurry mind: there is a little girl here (with white hair and green eyes), Jaskier is here (unwelcome), they are sitting around a fire, and oh, of course. The horse.

Yennefer brings up a scowl, and says, "Nilfgaard will not fucking win."

✫ ✫ ✫

It's Jaskier that dares interrupt her. She's appropriated the basement of Yurga's house, potions and scribbled diagrams litter the floor, candles alight all around. There's a single wooden table, and on it is one of Tissaia's old books, the dark magic, the kind you should never try and push chaos into. She's sitting with her back to the stairs, symbols drawn on her body with black ink, the kind that seeps into skin and stinks, more symbols drawn on the floor in chalk. Jaskier comes down the wooden stairs behind her, and pauses at the threshold.

"They think we should go to the Witcher keep," Jaskier says. She ignores him.

She picks up the knife to her right and holds it up, surveying the silver blade, the gentle curve of the handle. She presses the point against the left side of her abdomen, inhales slowly. There are four scars in total already, above and below where she holds the blade. In the darkened corner of the basement lie her disassembled failures. Behind her, she hears Jaskier shift his weight to the balls of his feet.

"You can't... it won't bring her back, you know," he says eventually. 

Again, she ignores him. She calls up the elder in her blood, begins a chant that Tissaia had theorized would work to summon the dead. It's Yennefer's blood that will give life. The air begins to whirl, the candles flickering, and on the floor the chalk symbols begin to rearrange themselves. Yennefer cuts herself open, deeper than last time, and a terrible howl starts to mix in with Yennefer's rhythmic elder. She grits her teeth, drags the knife inwards toward her right, blood beginning to flow down her stomach, soaking her thighs, dripping onto the floor.

She slices open the rest of her flesh, barely managing to keep the elder chant going, pain making her forehead bead with sweat, her throat working as she attempts to swallow the dryness in her mouth. The wind dies down, and then so does the scream, and then from the center of the chalk symbols and hand bursts from the nether portal. It's black, and cracked, and Yennefer feels hope shrivel up in her chest.

When it breaches the portal, head, shoulders, abdomen, it's clear what she's called up isn't a person. It has no face, just a gaping maw, and black skin, cracked to reveal what looks like thousands of wriggling maggots. Yennefer stops chanting, and the symbols disassemble themselves, returning to the places Yennefer drew them. The close portal severs the creature in half, and it topples onto its side, screaming in agony. Yennefer presses one hand to her open stomach, looking down at the damage with a cool distance that surprises her.

She can hear Jaskier behind her, wretching his lunch out in the corner. She casts igni at the thing, still pressing her wound tight. She summons a jar of Brokilon water from the table near the book, with the last of her strength. She opens it, and pours a fraction onto her stomach. She feels it begin to heal.

"Holy fucking shit," Jaskier says eventually. "That was fucking awful. Why do you keep trying that?"

Yennefer breathes out, picks up the chalk on her left, and begins sketching new symbols.

"I loved her," she says eventually.

✫ ✫ ✫

_I loved her._

In the dark depths of Hell, among a mass of writhing bodies, all burned or flayed raw, screaming, Tissaia de Vries opens her eyes. 

**Author's Note:**

> for some reason i kept uploading the wrong version of this so hopefully i did the right one this time. thank you so much!


End file.
